Easier eMedia

Google has just added a new “server clipboard” function to Google Docs. This isn’t just one-shot cut-and-paste; click on the new “clipboard” icon in the edit menu and you can copy a number of excerpts from one Google doc and paste them in any order into a different Google doc– or store them on your clipboard “in the cloud”, for, Google says, up to thirty days.

The new function, announced today on the official Google Docs blog, seems like it will be a handy tool; it was previously possible to cut-and-paste a single clip between word docs, spreadsheets and presentations –you can do that within-and-between online and desktop programs in any case– but the new “cloud” clipboard makes easy to accumulate and organize a number of excerpts for repeated insertion in different Google docs over a number of days or even weeks.

One oddity is that although the new clipboard function already appears on the edit menu in docs opened in the Firefox browser, it hasn’t shown up yet (or doesn’t seem to be working) on the same docs opened in Google’s own Chrome browser.

But it seems like it will be a nice little addition to the already very functional Google docs. Here’s Google’s own How-to-Page.

Update Feb 22: I’m speculating here, but perhaps the reason Clipboard isn’t working in Chrome is that Chrome is in transition (and apparently some upheaval) as Google moves Chrome toward HTML5 –the latest version of the code that makes everything possible on the web. HTML5 will have some nice new features, so stay tuned.